by Callan Wink
—
One night, Dr. Sandy put her wineglass down in mid-conversation, leaned over the dinner table, and kissed Lauren full on the lips, one hand wandering and getting tangled in Lauren’s hair.
Kisses have a way of gathering mass unto themselves—first there is a snowflake, then a snowball, then an avalanche. Dinners became sleepovers, and Lauren walked around feeling like overnight she somehow sprouted a strange new appendage, or woke up to find that an unexplored room had appeared in her old house. It was disconcerting, but not unpleasant. Definitely not unpleasant.
—
The Montana winters were hard on Sandy, sweet blooming flower of the South. She had arthritis in her knee from a riding accident she’d suffered as a girl, and when cold fronts blew down from the Canadian Rockies, she’d hobble and swear. Lauren bought her an electric blanket and made a point of coming by to shovel her out on the mornings when they’d gotten new snow. They made frequent trips down the valley to Chico Hot Springs to soak in the mineral water. Sandy said it helped her knee, and Lauren loved the way the thick white steam hung in the cold air, blanketing the pool, and how they could sit there, arms around each other, and no one could see a thing.
In the early spring, Sandy’s mother fell and broke her pelvis and Sandy took two weeks to go be with her. During this separation, Lauren spent a good deal of time trying to figure out just what in the hell she was doing. She was thirty-nine. She could still have kids or a kid, at least, if she wanted to. She could get married and all the rest. She didn’t have to resign herself to anything. But, she missed Sandy. It was an almost visceral truth. Had she ever wanted kids anyway, or was that just something she thought she should want? From what mixture of head and heart and womb do these thoughts arise?
Sandy came back and things continued as they had for a while. It was summer, maybe the best summer of Lauren’s life. They hiked up to the lakes above Pine Creek and had a picnic. They stripped and jumped in, shouting and cursing at the shock of the frigid water, then they dried off, lying side by side, shivering on the sun-warmed rock.
Fall came, days when you could taste the coming snow, the bloody-copper tang of it on the wind. People in town burning leaves under gray skies. Great flocks of geese making their way south, the ragged lines of them like stitched wounds in the bellies of the clouds.
Sandy’s mother was not doing well. She was going to need full-time care soon. Lauren could see what was coming. She wasn’t surprised when Sandy, after dinner one night, grasped her hand and said, “I’ve got an idea.” She had a smile on her face, hopeful, but scared too, she was putting her heart in her hands and offering it to Lauren. “What if you came with me down to Lafayette? You’d like my mother. She’s an old southern belle but smart and tough and I can see you two sitting on her porch drinking sweet tea and talking and that thought makes me happier than anything else I can think of. It’s warm there. There’s pecan trees and the people are so nice.”
Lauren thought about it. She really did. She got up and ran water in the sink and put the dinner dishes in to soak. She came back and sat at the table.
“What would I do,” she said. “In Lafayette, what could I possibly do, other than drink tea with your mother?”
Sandy was holding her hand again. She had both of hers around one of Lauren’s. Lauren was briefly aware of how alike the two of them were, their hands almost indistinguishable from one another. Blunt nails, dry cracked skin on the knuckles from frequent vigorous washing.
“You’d just help with my mother. I’d work—my old practice would be glad to have me back—and you’d make sure mom was okay. It wouldn’t be too demanding, and mostly you could do whatever you wanted. It would be perfect. I’d feel better having my mother looked after by someone I love and trust, and you wouldn’t have to find a crummy job someplace.” Sandy kept talking, her words speeding up and colliding with one another. Lauren had mostly stopped listening. She leaned back in her chair, pulling her hand from between Sandy’s.
—
Sometimes an action you think is born of conviction, staunchness, taking a stand, is actually a simple product of fear of the unknown. At the time she was indignant. How dare Sandy even ask that of her, after everything Lauren had told her about her own mother? Did Sandy really think she would be content to be some combination of housewife and caretaker? How would it look, their happy little family? Lauren stuck in the house with a querulous old woman in the Louisiana heat while Sandy went out and made a living for them both? Absolutely not.
Lauren’s self-righteous anger carried her through that fall. Work became awkward, and she slowly became aware of a growing suspicion that she’d been wrong, and cruel, and an idiot on top of that. But, she’d lived her entire life in one place. It was too late for her to reimagine herself as someone who could just pick up and leave. Louisiana wasn’t real to her. It was a swamp.
—
Dr. Sandy was gone before the snow hit. On her last day at the clinic, they had a going away party. They hugged and Lauren said something, choked on tears. “We’ll stay in touch. I’ll call you. Maybe I can visit?” They were in the middle of a crowded room and Dr. Sandy kissed her full on the lips and shook her head. “That’s not how it works with me,” she said. “I don’t do halfways.”
Then someone came and wished Dr. Sandy well and they were separated. Lauren watched her for a while. She was talking, laughing, even, holding a paper plate with a piece of cake on it. Dr. Sandy would be fine. It was written all over her. She was a woman who would make a good life for herself wherever she ended up. Lauren had the peculiar feeling that it was she who’d had her affections spurned, not the other way around. She never spoke to Dr. Sandy again.
—
No one had ever told Lauren that you could be in love and not know it until after the fact. It seemed like love, the very state of it, should be self-evident. That this wasn’t always the case rendered the whole enterprise suspect. If you were in love and didn’t know it, were you in love? If love didn’t clearly reveal itself to all parties involved, did it even exist on this planet? Was love a thing or an idea or just a hope? Does love have gradations? Levels? Volumes? Variations in force or intensity? Or, is love, as it seemed like it should be, a perfect natural phenomenon like the homing instinct of salmon or the supreme vision of an osprey or the incredible tensile strength of spider’s silk? Is love the human animal’s one ceaseless, oft-neglected gift from the universe?
5.
If you live long enough, eventually there is a doubling back. In old age, there is a regression to childhood, of course. But before that, even, late middle age can become more like young adulthood than would seem possible. At age forty-eight, Lauren was again in the habit of going to the Longbranch on Friday nights. It actually wasn’t called the Longbranch anymore but its new name never registered with Lauren, as she was now part of the demographic that mainly knew things by what they used to be, rather than what they actually were.
She drank whiskey and ginger ale, and sat with her back to the bar watching the dance floor. Occasionally, drunks would ask her to dance, and she’d shake them off silently. Sometimes, more rarely, nondrunks would ask her to dance and she’d turn them down as well. She met Manny there one night. The bar was full, and he came stumbling through the crowd, cane in one hand, sloshing drink in the other. As he was making his way past, the stool next to her became vacant, and, simple as that, he lurched himself onto it and into her life. Something was obviously wrong with his legs, and he had a hard time getting up on the stool. His cane whacked her shins. He nearly spilled his drink on her, and he was cursing. When he got settled, he turned to her, hanging his cane by the crook from the bar top.
“No,” he said. “Don’t even ask. I will not dance with you.” Then he turned away from her and began drinking. She had to laugh, despite herself.
Many drinks later, they did dance, slowly. He was without his cane, so she had to hold him upright, although by then she was none too steady herself.<
br />
That night, he’d told her he had nerve damage from taking shrapnel in Vietnam. A few months later, after they’d gone to the courthouse and signed the papers, he admitted he’d never even been to Vietnam. His number never got picked. What he had was multiple sclerosis. He could look forward to the continued degeneration of his body on a timeline and severity scale known only to the disease itself. He might remain more or less as he was for years, or, over the course of a few months, devolve into a complete invalid.
Lauren quit the veterinary clinic and took the night custodian position at the high school. The pay was similar but the health benefits were much better. She missed the animals and the normal hours. Getting to work as the sun was going down was disorienting, but it did mean that she could sleep most of the day when Manny was awake, which turned out to be good. She’d moved in with him, his modular home on the windswept bench on the west side of the river. He’d gotten the cattle a few months before his MS diagnosis. It had been getting increasing hard for him to take care of their feed and water, and he had been on the verge of selling them before he met Lauren. Now that he had her, he decided to keep them.
Manny clung to the cane for as long as possible before succumbing to the wheelchair, and, when this transition finally came, it was not pleasant. Lauren lay a sheet of plywood down on the front steps for a ramp so he could come in and out on his own. When it was warm, he’d roll outside to drink in the front yard. When it was cold, he’d stay inside and drink with the TV on mute while Lauren slept. During the week things between them were bearable. They saw each other for one or two hours at best. On weekends, though, it was different. He’d yell for her to bring him more ice for his drink or change the radio station or to adjust the volume of the TV. In nice weather, he’d be outside rolling around, drinking Lauder’s scotch from a travel mug, shouting out things that needed her attention.
“Come out and look at the steer with the white on its face. Is there something wrong with his hoof? Come here and look at the corner of the foundation here. Is that a crack? The mailbox post is tipping a little to the left. The next big wind, and the thing is going to fall right over. You need to get out here and shore it up or our mail is going to get scattered all over the damn countryside. Goddamnit, Lauren, I need you to keep this place from crumbling into the dust. I’m counting on you here.”
Occasionally, when Manny was especially far gone, and she was helping him into the bath or onto the couch or bed, he’d become enraged and lash out at her. Once, he’d connected, a hard, closed fist to her eye, and she’d seen an explosion of white sparks and then she’d dropped him, and left him, on the floor of the bathroom. She went and sat in the kitchen with a bag of frozen peas on her swelling eye, trying to ignore him as his angry screams turned to sobs, the first of their kind she’d ever heard.
—
In the summer months, Lauren began taking small road trips on the weekends. She’d load up the truck with a cooler and an inflatable mattress and a tarp and head out. She went to the Bighorn Canyon and then over to the Little Bighorn Battlefield monument. She went to the Lewis & Clark Caverns and took a candlelit tour, the hanging mineral formations breaking and sending the flickering candles’ glow in a million different directions. Manny didn’t like her to be gone, but there was nothing he could do to stop her. And even he realized that when she left for the weekend she was generally in good spirits for the rest of the week when she got back.
On one of the last nice weekends in October, Lauren packed up and headed to Butte. She wanted to see the Berkeley Pit and walk around the old town to see the crumbling copper-king mansions. It was a beautiful weekend. She camped one night and then, on the second night, sprung for a room at the Finlan Hotel with its ornate, high-ceilinged lobby, the chandeliers and wall accents made of pure, polished copper. The room was pretty and had a clawfoot tub, and she soaked until the water began to cool, and then she drained and refilled the tub and soaked some more. She had a steak at the Cavalier Lounge and drank a dirty martini. She walked around town some more at night so she could see the neon bar lights, and, way up on the hillside, the white glow of the ninety-foot-tall Our Lady of the Rockies statue.
Sunday morning, she woke up late and took her time getting back. She stopped more than she needed to—for coffee, for water, for the bathroom, for gum. Despite all this, she still made it home before dark. She pulled into the driveway as the sun was getting ready to set. The cattle had come to the edge of the fence and were looking at her as she sat in the truck, taking deep breaths, trying to retain, for a little while longer, that good, carefree, weekend-away feeling. She got her bag and went inside. Usually when she returned she found the kitchen a disaster area of dirty dishes and empty soup cans and beer bottles and puddles from dropped ice cubes. Upon hearing her open the door, Manny would begin shouting about something that needed her attention and she would set her bag down, square her shoulders, and get started cleaning things up. Today, however, the house was quiet, the TV off. There was only one empty soup can in the sink and Manny was nowhere to be seen. She went to the back porch to see if he was outside smoking, but he wasn’t there either.
Eventually she spotted him, and she knew immediately. He’d wheeled himself out to the far corner of the pasture and his back was to the house. There was a turkey vulture resting on his shoulder like some hideous overgrown parrot. From a distance, it looked like the bird was whispering a secret into his ear. When she came closer she saw that the blast from the shotgun in his lap had removed the part of his head where his ear would have been and the bird was doing something there altogether different.
—
With Manny gone, once again her life resumed its simple course, dinner with wine, magazines on the table. She stopped the weekend trips.
She decided to sell the steers. She’d made a call and set up a time for a livestock truck to come and take them away. The day before its arrival, she’d come home to find that they’d broken out. It was early morning, and she was tired after a long day. She saw the fence was down and the cattle were gone and she decided to go inside and sleep for a few hours until it was light enough to see, and then she would go out and round them up.
She lay down with her clothes on, and was awakened a short time later by pounding on the door. It was just past dawn, the mountains still black, the pasture streaked with gray light. Manny’s son, Jason, was at the door, his long hair tangled, eyes shot with red, looking like he hadn’t slept in a long time. His black shepherd dog sat on the steps staring at her more directly than any natural-born dog would dare. She hadn’t seen him since Manny’s funeral. He’d spent the whole service eyeing her murderously.
Jason was holding a long section of vinyl house siding in his hand. When she opened the door he waved it in her face.
“See? Look at this. You see this? I’m watching TV and I come out to see your goddamn loose animals tearing up my lawn, rubbing themselves against my house. This is Timber Tek siding. The best they make. It’s made to look like wood. You see that? That’s simulated wood grain right there. You don’t get that unless you pay extra. I paid extra for the wood grain, and now you are going to pay to get everything put back just the way it was.”
He kept ranting. She was having a hard time following. Something about court-appointed attorneys and the invalidation of wills composed while incompetent. His words were running together, and he repeatedly wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. And then, he flung the piece of siding at her and retreated a few steps. He had one hand raised in the air, his index finger up and pointing at the sky.
“Get your house in order,” he screamed. “Or, so help me god, one more of those shitting animals steps on my property and I’ll shoot it dead and drag it to your doorstep.” He turned and stomped off the porch, the shepherd dog at his heels.
The livestock truck was scheduled to show up the next day, and right then she decided that she was going to call and cancel. Lauren put on her boots and set out across the pasture to re
trieve her cattle. An hour later, she had them back in the enclosure and she mended the break in the fence. Splicing the wire together in the first of what would be many fixes. While she worked, she thought of each person she’d known in this world who had died or left and she tried to put them on a scale against the people she still knew who were still alive and in her life. Never had finding a balance seemed more desperate.
The Reds stood, flies blowing around their flanks, seemingly as happy to be fenced in as they were to be roaming free. “That’s enough of that,” she said to them. “I don’t expect anymore of that out of you lot.”
II
1.
Wind and loneliness, interminable fatigue, and broken trees. Also, animals that needed to be fed. The same world that wanted to steamroll you also contained goats bleating their hunger, eggs that would go to waste if they weren’t gathered, cattle that would run wild if they weren’t contained. Lauren watered. She milked. She grained. She gathered. She collected all the splintered pieces of her trees and doused them with kerosene in her burn barrel. She tossed in a match, and there was a concussive whump as the pines caught fire, and she didn’t even stand there for one second to watch them burn.
—
Winter came creeping down from the north, frosting the hill pines, taking up residence in her hands. She swallowed four ibuprofen every morning. In the long evenings, she sat at the kitchen table, soaking her stiff fingers in a bowl of hot water. Sometimes, before night fell, she could see Jason’s shepherd dog padding across the snow-blown field between their houses.
The wind picked pieces of her house and sent them spinning out into the drifts. A shingle here, a section of trim there, a blue sliver of siding, piercing a backdrop of pure white.
There was a storm that lasted for three days. Her road was drifted shut and all night she lay awake, listening to the house shift and creak under the weight of the snow.